Creating an Effective Advertising Campaign

Talk to almost any advertising agency, or Fortune 500 company exec about advertising and promotion, and you will almost certainly hear the buzz words "fragmented advertising" and "consumer-centric campaigns" and long discussions about the many pitfalls and difficulties of creating effective advertising campaigns today.

What is fragmentation exactly? It's the increase in the number of available methods for getting your message to your audience.

One of the main difficulties faced by any entrepreneur is that advertising has changed and evolved over the last few years. It now includes visual, audio and electronic media.

In fact, if you do a Google search for advertising, you may feel overwhelmed by all the options available to you now -- if you just look at the options for your Website you'll find popups, popovers, audio messages, flash video, RSS, even animated "sales people" that can be programmed to appear right on your Website and interact with your customers. And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

So is traditional advertising -- which includes billboards, radio, television, newspaper and magazine -- dead?

Not by a long shot. According to one top advertising mogul, traditional advertising methods are still around because they still work.

The trick is to figure out who your target market is, what they want, and how they look for that information.

Mark Twain said, "Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."

If you know customers, you can spend your advertising dollars on the mediums they use to look for answers.

If your customers are senior citizens who are not online, then focus the majority of your advertising dollars on the newspapers, magazines, television, and radio that they are reading, watching or listening to.

If your target market are working parents, you need to know how, when and where they get their information. Is it on the Internet? What radio stations do they listen to? What magazines are they reading? Do they watch television? When? Why?

So what are your best options for creating an effective advertising campaign?

Here are some simple steps:

1. Know your audience. What do they want? Where do they shop? What do they read? How old are they? Where do they hang out? Do they need your product or services? Can they afford your product or services?

2. Know your competition. Be prepared to do a little detective work. What are your three main competitors doing to advertise? Where are they advertising? How often? What types of advertising methods are they using? How long have they been running? Are you reaching the same audience? Is your message different?

Look at what they're doing right, and figure out creative ways that you can make your advertising just a little bit better, or differentiate yourself from the crowd.

3. Next take a look at what the "big dogs" in your field are doing, and see if you can adapt some of their methods to your target audience and your budget.

4. Know your message. What exactly are you trying to say? What do your customers want to hear? Why should they buy from you, and not someone else? Make every word count.

Chances are, your customers are much more tech-savvy than they were five years ago, or even one year ago. The Internet has made unbelievable amounts of information accessible, but it also has contributed to the "information overload" consumers complain of.

Another side effect of the Internet is that your customers have probably become used to getting "instant gratification" when they are looking for information, products or services. They want it, and they want it now. Are you giving your customers what they want, when they want it?

If you want to have an effective advertising campaign, don't try to be everything to everyone. Think of your advertising as a conversation between you and your one "ideal" customer.

Remember, if you're giving your customers what they want, they don't perceive your ads as a nuisance, they see them as a service.

Traditional advertising is not dead and you can use it to your advantage if you pay attention to who your customers are, and what they want.

About the Author:
Hans Hasselfors is a successful business entrepreneur and internet marketing consultant. Get the net working for you. Join a community of like-minded authors and publishers and make your living online. Become a member of our article directory. www.SubmitYourNewArticle.com
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

How To Jam Your Website With Traffic

"Traffic! Traffic! I need traffic to my website! I have been trying so hard to write articles and submit them to article directories but still can't see traffic flowing in to my website. Why?"....hear the screaming voice of many website owners who are hungry of internet traffic.

"Article" had been recognized as internet #1 marketing strategy and the most effective way to generate tons of traffic to a website. You heard about this statement before and putting a lot of efforts to write "articles" and working very hard to submit them to many article directories which you can find from internet; while waiting for your articles to be approved by these article directories, you start to imagine with smiling face:

"If those 200 articles directories which I submitted with my 3 articles, each one bring me 200 internet traffic to my website, then I will have 120,000 targeted traffic and If 10% of those visitors buy my product or click on my Adsense ads, then I will earn $$$.........".

You wait with patient and with full of hopes for your articles to be approved and drive tons of internet traffic to your website. Finally, your articles are lived on internet and you start to monitor your website internet traffic from time to time. This is the situation you may face:

Day one: 0 visitor drop by to your website. You give yourself an excuse that it only one day you articles live on internet, let wait for some times.

Day Two: again 0 visitors.

Day three has two visitors; day four has 3 visitors; day five has none visitor......day by day past.....where are those 120,000 targeted traffic? You wonder!

This time failed never mind, you try the same process again: Writing a few articles, submit them to hundreds of article directories, waiting with hopes for approval, monitor your website traffic from time to time.

"What's goes wrong.....why my articles can't drive traffic to my website?" This must be the questions come up to your mind after a few failures. If this is your case, the first thing that you need to do is review your articles. Are your articles attractive enough to lead your article readers to complete reading your article and curious enough to get further information by visiting your website through the link from your article.

In order to drive traffic to your website using articles, these steps must happen:

1. Internet surfer looks for information from internet or ezines directories. Hundreds or thousands of search results or related articles list up for the internet surfer to choose from; he or she will selectively click on the links from search results based on the summary of each search result or article which he or she thinks the links will bring him or her to the useful information he/she needs.

At this first step, you need to have an eye catching article title and summary which will draws the attention of your potential website visitors.

2. Next, your article needs to drive your readers to complete reading your article and create the anxiousness to get more or further information by visiting your website. According to the experts, good articles are articles which can connect to your audience with emotion beside provide them with necessary information.

Facts and Statistics are fine but what makes us take action is emotion. If your articles are all fact and create no emotion then who cares about going on to find more dry facts at your web site. Your articles will fall into the depths of article directories everywhere and be a big fat waste of your time and efforts.

There are many tips and tricks available from internet on how to write a killer article that will flood your website with traffic. Simply search on this article directory with keyword "Killer Article" or "Quality Article" will give you many results with useful information.

If there is a need, you might want to get help from a professional writer to write you a quality article and private label it to yours for submission. There are many good writers around where you can use their service; off course fee normally incur, but it's may gives you a good return in investment (ROI).

Do waste your time just to write articles but put your effort to write quality articles. It's true that "Article" is the internet #1 marketing strategy. Just good & bad articles that make the different.

Article Marketing remain internet's #1 marketing but article submission to hundreds article directories is very time consuming for internet marketers.

About the Author:
Jenny Harvard gives an easy implementation of this marketing strategy to internet marketers, small business owners and home business entrepreneurs. Visit http://www.submityourarticle.biz for more information.
Added: 01 Nov 2006
Article Source: http://articles.simplysearch4it.com/article/41208.html

Malicious Advertising

Advertising is a necessary irritant in the world today. You can't drive down the street without coming across an ad, either a billboard suspended over a road or a large poster plastered down the side of a bus. If you walk into a shopping centre it doesn't matter where you look, you see an advertisement of some kind. Even the tables in the food court now have ads embedded in them, and on my last trip to Melbourne I noticed that they were starting to embed flat screen TVs into the tables to deliver the full commercial experience to your meal. If you jump on the Internet you have to contend with pop-ups and banner ads, with some advertising agents being ruthless enough to write malicious code that embeds the ad into your computer so that you still receive the pop-ups even when you're not at the original site.

In the past, pop-ups and banner ads have been easy enough to avoid with the right software installed (incidentally, am I the only one who finds pop-up ads that advertise pop-up blockers tremendously amusing?) but now the software developers have worked their way around that little problem. The solution was simple; sell advertising space in your software, not just on your web page.

As much as I like to complain about this new idea, it does come with a significant upside. These days, not all Shareware applications drop out after a limited period of use, nor do they constantly remind you to register. Having ads in the software provides the application developers with the necessary funding to live but leaves the user free from having to pay to use the software. It ends up being in the developer's best interest to ensure that the user continues to use the software for as long as possible, because that means an increased income. In my opinion this was a brilliant idea, and I wholeheartedly supported it until they started building unblockable pop-ups into the software.

The gaming world is getting in on the act as well, which could be both positive and negative. The Internet provides the functionality for games to constantly update the virtual world with new billboards, TV ads, clothing and so on, keeping the content fresh and the ads current. From an advertising standpoint it's an amazing idea, people are spending less and less time watching TV and more and more time immersed in virtual worlds. The interactive nature of the ads means that they will remain in a player's mind for a lot longer than the TV ad break that can be walked away from, flicked over or simply ignored. The game developers on the other hand now have an added source of income, meaning that they can take more risks without the fear of losing money.

Advertising in games is not a new idea, the soft drink '7-Up' created a game many years ago called 'Cool Spot', which had the player controlling a red dot with sunglasses in his quest to collect 7-Up logos. The game was remarkably solid, leaving the players to enjoy the game while still getting its message across. I played it a long time ago as a child, but I still remember how much fun it was and exactly what product it was pushing. Pepsi released a Playstation game called 'Pepsi Man' that involved a blue and white striped super-hero running around collecting cans of Pepsi. Red Bull got in on the game with 'Wipeout' featuring 'Red Bull' banners and a loading screen bearing the phrase "Increase your reaction time with Red Bull". 'Worms 3D' featured Red Bull as a power up. 'Crazy Taxi' had customers jump in the player's taxi and holler "Take me to KFC!" or any of the numerous other licensed locations in the game. 'True Crime' had the characters dressed in 'Puma' attire, with the main character changing his outfits several times throughout the game. Until now I've always thought that the ads in games were amusing and, so long as they didn't interfere with the playing of the game, I was all for them. However, there are new ideas afoot that seem set to change my mind.

The main problem I have with ads in games now is the same as my issue with Pay TV. You're shelling out a lot of money for a product (new games being sold for upwards of $50.00 U.S.) and you're still getting ads. If developers are going to start flooding my entertainment with advertising, I'd like to see a significant drop in the price of games.

The other big issue is that of spyware. Until now, spyware has been a hated part of existence. This malicious software digs its way into your system and collects information about you: your Internet surfing habits, the contents of your hard drive(s) and even the unblocked ports available on your computer. This has lead to the necessity of loading a system with anti-spyware utilities to run alongside the pop-up killers, anti-virus programs, firewalls, registry guards and whatever other protective measures a paranoid PC user has to implement. Now paradoxically, someone has had the 'fantastic' idea of building spyware into software, and games in particular.

In the future the games that you've just paid such a high price for will sit there monitoring you in the background, watching your every virtual move. Then they can target ads that are more likely to have an impact on you based on the contents of your hard drive or your Internet surfing habits. The best part about it is that as soon as you click 'I Agree' and install the software, it becomes legitimate and you've agreed for them to access information about you. Many software products already feature clauses in their license agreements that have the user permitting the developers to collect 'anonymous information in order to provide the customer with a better experience'. The other part of this that irks me is the fact that I'm going to have to have my computer connected to the Internet and chew through my download limit just to play a single-player game.

In the end, I suppose that there's no way to avoid advertising in our current world. Having it implemented into software and games was simply the next logical step. I suspect that I will be looking to download the inevitable 'Ad Blocker' cracks that I imagine will appear shortly after the wholesale introduction of advertising into the gaming industry, but I do believe that with appropriate tact and respect for privacy, advertising could turn out to be a positive addition to the interactive experience.

About the Author:
Daniel Punch, M6.Net, http://www.m6.net
Article Source: www.iSnare.com